'Mockingjay – Part 1' Screenwriter Reveals Alternate 'Breaking Bad'-Style Ending
Josh Hutcherson plays the brainwashed Peeta
Lionsgate’s decision to split The Hunger Games: Mockingjay into two parts didn’t stop fans from flooding theaters on the film’s opening weekend. Nevertheless, the cliffhanger ending of Part 1 did perplex critics and leave more than a few moviegoers unsatisfied. In a new Buzzfeed interview, screenwriter Peter Craig explains how he decided on the moment to split Suzanne Collins’ final Hunger Games novel in half.
[Spoiler alert!] The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 follows heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she makes the decision to lead the revolution against the corrupt Capitol, which has been organizing the sadistic Hunger Games events and oppressing Panem’s citizens for decades. Before she will commit herself to being a revolutionary, however, Katniss insists on a dangerous mission to find and rescure her friend and sort-of-fiance Peeta (Josh Hutcherson, above), who has been kidnapped by the evil President Snow.
Related: Does Anyone in ‘The Hunger Games’ Know How to Pronounce Panem?
The mission is successful, but Peeta has been so brainwashed and broken by Snow’s people that when he sees the love of his life, he immediately tries to kill her. The movie ends on a downbeat note, with Katniss gazing at Peeta through a plexiglass window as he writhes in a hospital bed.
“It wound up feeling like a really natural place to break the book, because after Peeta’s back, and you have a whole different set of priorities,” Craig told Buzzfeed. “There’s a whole different process that Katniss goes through with him once he’s back. … This look she gives Peeta — she’s looking at somebody who she really loves who isn’t just a pawn in this chess game the way he is to everybody else. I always really liked it ending sort of intercutting between Coin and Katniss there, and how their priorities have suddenly split at the end of the movie. We’re actually ending a little bit at a fork in the road. Then there really is a feeling of completion right there.”
Related: About Jennifer Lawrence’s Singing in ‘Mockingjay — Part 1’ (Which You Can Now Hear Online)
Some viewers will disagree with that last sentence, but they should know that Part 1 could have finished on a much more unsettling note. Director Francis Lawrence told Buzzfeed that he, Craig, and producer Nina Jacobson talked about ending the film right after a crazed Peeta attacks Katniss, which they jokingly dubbed the “Breaking Bad ending.”
“Nina and I and Peter used to all talk about Breaking Bad. And for a while we were talking about, like, that’s kind of the Breaking Bad ending,” said Lawrence. “But you [only] have to wait a week, and if you binge-watch it, you don’t have to wait at all before the next episode. To me, there’s a difference between ending on a note that really makes people want more, and ending on a note that just makes people angry.”
Novelist Suzanne Collins also had a say in how the movies were structured. At the beginning of the screenwriting process, Collins wrote an outline for each half of her novel Mockingjay, laying out the characters and story beats. “We felt that the first movie would focus on the propaganda war, and getting Peeta back,” said producer Jacobson. “The second movie [was] about all-out war, and taking Snow out. … Those big ideas were very much informed by Suzanne’s approach to how we would split the book into two movies.”
Related: ‘Mockingjay — Part 1’: Natalie Dormer on Shaving Her Head and Directing Jennifer Lawrence
As expected, the filmmakers seem to have saved most of the big action and set pieces for the final Hunger Games film, Mockingjay – Part 2, which hits theaters in 2015. “[In] the next movie, I think, everybody will feel that we’re starting at a much different place,” said Craig.
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